“Every Wednesday,” said Annette, in English, “I have a date with ten men, so I need to get ready. Lars is in the forest.” And with that we followed her directions down a series of forest tracks until we found a pick-up truck parked by a narrow path that wound its way amongst the trees. Following it, Cicci suddenly stopped and pointed. “Reindeer!” And there they were, a small group, picking their way over the lichen and blueberry bushes, their summer coats chocolate brown, their outsize, heavily velveted antlers giving them an almost mythical appearance.
Lars is Sami. His ancestors were the first people to settle in this area once the inland ice from the last ice age retreated. They have lived in the area known as Sameland, which today comprises parts of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Kola Peninsula in Russia, for 7,000 years. Their survival was dependent on extraordinary physical stamina and endurance, a deep knowledge and understanding of the natural world and most important of all, reindeer. The reindeer we were looking at were wild, but they belong to Lars. There are thought to be up to quarter of a million reindeer in Northern Sweden and all of them belong to Sami families. We tried to find out when the idea of ‘ownership’ was adopted, as opposed to simply following the herds, but no-one could really remember. The Sami year is the reindeer year and late summer (one of eight Sami seasons) is a quiet time, when the reindeer are feeding up for the winter ahead.
Lars is a forest Sami and the eighth generation of his family to live in this area. We found him sitting on the step of a wooden cabin beside a lake. Other cabins were dotted amongst the trees, which he and Annette rent out to people who want to get an experience of forest Sami life. He still uses his cabin as his base during the summer but as winter approaches he will drive his herd down towards the river, to more protected feeding grounds. Once this would have been done on skis with only dogs to help, but nowadays skidoos and even helicopters are used to drive the herds. Development in the valley - more roads and more logging – have meant that Lars is forced to move his reindeer by truck - an expensive business. The area of forest where the reindeer spend the winter has dwindled too, so they rely more on commercial feed. The price of reindeer meat is fixed by the government and although it still seems expensive to the consumer, it barely meets the other rising costs. But more worrying to Lars than this are the changes that he’s seeing to the natural world. In the last fifty years, he said, the vegetation of the forest floor has changed radically. Once dominated by mosses and lichens, these are now being edged out by blueberry and other plants that thrive in warmer conditions. As the ideal reindeer diet is made up of an enormous variety of plants, Lars’ concern is that less diversity on the forest floor will mean the reindeer struggle to find enough to eat throughout the year. More important still is the snow, which, perhaps contrary to expectation, plays a vital role in the life cycle of everything that lives in this part of the world. It is coming later, melting sooner and Lars fears in another fifty years life as he and his ancestors knew it will no longer be possible.
We returned with him to the farm to see his stags. “Reindeer always return to the place they were born,” he explained, “but these weren’t born here, so I have to keep them fenced in.” On the lawn was an extraordinary site. On one side sat Annette surrounded by men in fluorescent vests drinking coffee and eating cake, their hard hats laid respectfully on the grass, their diggers and road-building machines lined up along the road outside. Below them, by the house, a small herd of reindeer grazed contently in the afternoon sun. “That’s why I don’t need a lawnmower,” said Lars, his eyes crinkling with the smile that was lost in the depths of his beard.
The next day Jake and I drove north and east, crossing the Arctic Circle. This being Sweden, there was a roadside display to mark the point and even a little table erected in front of the arctic circle sign for cameras. We dutifully took a rather boring photo and drove on to the gloriously named town of Jokkmokk. Jokkmokk is on the tourist map because of its famously debauched winter market and reindeer races that take place in February. The rest of the year it is a quiet, well ordered town where we spent an hour or so in the excellent Ajtte museum learning more about the Sami, their land and the wildlife they share it with. Armed with the invaluable knowledge of how to tell the difference between moose poo and reindeer poo, we pressed on to Porjus.
Porjus doesn’t make it into either of the guidebooks Jake and I had with us. It is a pretty ordinary little place that was built in the early 20th century to support the hydroelectric power station and the iron ore mines to the north. With a population of barely 400, it is not somewhere to go for a wild night out, but it is home to Patricia, and she is reason enough to stop in Porjus. Patricia got married at sixteen, had two sons and lived for thirty years just outside Birmingham. At forty she found herself single, with grown-up children and when one of her sons suggested she come to northern Sweden where he was taking part in a survival course, she thought, ‘why not?’ While her son ate worms and dug bear traps Patricia was falling in love. “It was the space,” she said “and the air, and the peace.” She returned in the depths of winter and spent three weeks living alone in a cabin in the forest. “I had no idea how to ski so I asked the guide to carry the eggs. He needn’t have bothered. They all froze anyway.” As did her cheese and her toothpaste. The few dim daylight hours were spent drilling through metres of ice to collect water and cutting firewood to try and keep the temperature inside the hut above -20. “I loved it. I loved the cold. I spent three hours doing chores and the rest of the time I was just alone with my thoughts.” And it was during this time that Patricia saw the Northern Lights for the first time in her life. On a subsequent three month winter stay she had come into Porjus to buy supplies and noticed that her favourite building – the old railway station, had a ‘for sale’ sign tacked on the wall. “I bought it. I didn’t even go inside. I didn’t plan it or even think about it. If I had I’d never have done it.” The railway station is now her home and gallery. Her photographs of the Northern Lights line one small room, another has beautiful intricate close-up photographs of snow-flakes, her current obsession. She has published a book and the Japanese have fitted the building with webcams so the Northern Lights can be watched live on the internet. Porjus, it turns out, is one of the best places on earth to see them. She has opened a guest house next door, learnt Swedish and married a local man. “I live,” she said, over a cup of Tetley, “in the best place in the world.”
It would seem that UNESCO would agree with her. The area called Laponia, which comprises four national parks and two nature reserves was designated a world heritage site in 1996, for both its natural and cultural importance. Porjus is soon to become the gateway to Laponia. A new building, the Laponia House, sits on the outskirts of town awaiting furniture and fittings, but with plans to be a one-stop information centre for all visitors to the region. Here we met Josef, a Sami and a world heritage guide, who generously took us back to his house and over dried reindeer meat and coffee, gave us the low-down on Laponia and the Sami culture of the high hills. Unlike Lars’ reindeer, the herds belonging to Josef’s family and other Sami of this area, spend the summer high up in the mountains bordering Norway. In the Autumn they are driven down to the forest around Porjus and in April they gather in their thousands on the frozen lake outside Patricia’s house and are herded 150 kilometres back into the hills. The journey takes two weeks. “By the time they get there, the reindeer are very tired, but as soon as they smell the new spring grass under the snow they get very excited and forget how tired they are.” They give birth to their calves up in the hills and some will be sold to other Sami families Each new reindeer is marked – the left ear is cut with the mark of the family, the right with the mark of the individual. A Sami’s reindeer herd is his bank account and you never, warned Josef, ask a Sami how many reindeer he has.
It was time for us to follow in the footsteps of the reindeer and head for the high hills. We drove down what could be one of the world’s most scenic roads to the small settlement of Ritsem. Here we bought some final supplies in a funny little shop that sold things like candles and packets of dried soup and, inexplicably, large white knickers with Ritsem printed on them at a jaunty angle. We loaded rucksacks and a box of food alongside fishing tackle and waders and squeezed into a helicopter with two burly fishermen. We flew over lakes and craggy foothills and were deposited, twenty minutes later, into another world.
We were on a narrow clearing beside yet another lake, dotted with wooden cabins and three small round buildings, two of which were entirely covered in turf and looked like the sort of place a hobbit might live. This is the summer home of LarsAnders and Maria and very near to LarsAnders’ birthplace; the ruins of the tiny birch wood and turf houses where he was brought up a few hundred metres away. The house they live in now, despite looking diminutive from the outside, is spacious and light inside and we sat on the floor covered in springy twigs and reindeer skins, along with their daughter Stina, various grandchildren, two dogs and the helicopter pilot, who having dropped off the fishermen, came back to join us for coffee and more reindeer. Stina, translating for her parents, told us Maria would bake bread and smoke fish for us, told us where to collect water and wood and showed us the sauna they had built on the beach. Our home, a little further along the shore, was also an octagonal cabin (mimicking the shape of the traditional teepees) with a turf roof and inside bunk beds, a couple of gas rings for cooking and a wood burning stove. But what lay beyond the cabin made it truly special - the wild beauty of the Padjelanta national park; miles and miles of peaks and bogs, rivers and lakes, stark, jaw-dropping wilderness in every direction as far as the eye can see.
This is the land of moose and eagles, the Sami and their reindeer and for a few days only, a couple of Brits, drunk on clean air, perfect silence and the endless possibilities of space. We spent a morning with Cicci’s cousin Paul who is a mad keen fly-fisherman and despite having fished all over the world, still claims this is one of the best and most challenging areas to fly fish. I managed to fall waist deep in the river while examining a caddis fly larva and we thought it best to leave before disrupting the fishing any more. The rest of the time we just walked. There is a long distance trail which runs for 150kms through the park and a network of cabins to stay in, but despite the weather being perfect and at this time of year the infamous clouds of voracious mosquitoes have all but disappeared, we hardly saw another person. At night we returned to our cabin exhausted and footsore and soothed aching limbs with a steaming sauna and a heart-stoppingly cold plunge into the lake. We ate freshly smoked fish, cleaned our teeth under the stars and as the temperature fell below zero, curled up in our sleeping bags and slept like dead dogs. On our second night Jake woke me with an urgent whispered shout. I leapt up and waddled in my sleeping bag to the open door where he was standing pointing at the sky. My sleep befuddled brain took a moment to realise what was going on. The sky was awash with a strange, eerily shifting emerald green light. We stood transfixed as it swirled and faded and finally was gone. It was the first time either of us had seen the Northern Lights. Neither of us will forget it.
We had decided not to return by helicopter, preferring the slower, gentler transition back to the real world on foot. As we walked Jake was already planning his return. He is competing in the Polar Race next year and asked LarsAnders if he could come back and stay in the cabin in the winter to do some training for the race. “Of course,” said LarsAnders, “if you can find it under the snow!”
“So should I write this article?” I asked Jake.
“Just say it rained all the time and there were loads of mosquitoes, that’ll put people off.” I looked at him with mock horror. “Well, it is like that some of the time. We were lucky.” Yes, I thought, we really were.
KATE HUMBLE
31/8/06
